Sunday, September 21, 2008

Why can't I get nice paper in the USA?

Still on the Japan thing...

In the Motomachi shopping street in Kobe, there is a small stationary store. In there, I found and purchased a pad of paper of the sort I used to get when in college. It was smooth, high quality and with fine graduated graph lines.

I spent the rest of the week doing my job (which is why I was in Kobe in the first place), jotting down my thoughts and designs on this pad of paper.

What occurred to me was that the reason I stopped using paper in that fashion, is not because computers got so much better at taking notes but because the quality of the paper and the nature of the gridlines printed on them has gone dramatically downhill since the early 1990s. Bad paper is no fun to use.

If anyone has a line on a good supply of really nice linear graph, log-lin and log-log paper of the sort available in the Manchester University bookstore circa 1990, without having to fly to Japan, please leave a note here.

1 comment:

Tina said...

Gee all my husband brought me back from japan was a fan--sure would have liked some good graph paper....